My job requires frequent traveling between the East and West coast. On every trip, I can’t wait for the plane to reach the 10,000 feet altitude so I can turn on my computer and connect to the onboard Wi-Fi to get some work done. But as many of you…

Third party providers bring a lot of benefits to a website including lower operational cost (CDNs), revenue generation (Ads), and better insights (Analytics). Just like any component of a system, they also bring risks, which both providers and sites try to manage by various means. The most talked risk…

In our blog we focus a lot on failures and performance issues as it is the best way to educate our readers on how to deal with their performance fires. However, today we are blogging about the opposite – it is a story of how a retail site took the…

What better way to start 2012 than with a big product release! Our engineering team completed over 100 user stories. Here are three key features that were released and are a first in a synthetic monitoring solution: New Monitor Type: Playback We are introducing a new monitor type called Playback. Playback…

We all know how dangerous blind spots are when driving. Before changing lanes or making a turn, you check your mirror and turn your head to ensure there is no car in your blind spot. Make a decision using the mirror alone and you could end up smashing into…

One of the biggest challenges for online companies is troubleshooting an unexpected slowness of their web site or application in highly distributed architecture. Pinpointing the exact root cause of the slowness is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Looking at a typical large scale web site infrastructure you…

For our frequent readers, it is no surprise that we firmly believe DNS has a huge impact on Performance. One of the biggest challenges with DNS is understanding what impact various DNS issues can have on end users. DNS resolution is complex and we lack insight on how end users’…

While monitoring the performance of the Internet Retailer Top 50 Retailers this past Holiday Season, we also tracked what third party vendors and CDNs were utilized and measured their impact on each website. The data collected not only offered insights on what third parties and CDNs are most utilized, but…

According to ComsScore, Retail online spending for the entire November – December 2011 holiday season touched $37.2 Billion, an increase of 15% versus last year. In a perfect world these numbers look great for the state of ecommerce, but we (and cyberspace) exist in a world governed by Murphy’s Law. Anything…

As we are closing 2011, take a look at our most popular and insightful blog posts: A New Blind Spot for Web Performance Tools (03/02/2011): We cover a new monitoring blind spot with Internet Explorer tools when measuring iframe response time. If a JavaScript is executed right after iframe request…